Article published in:
Psycholinguistic approaches to production and comprehension in bilingual adults and children
Edited by Maialen Iraola Azpiroz, Shanley E.M. Allen, Kalliopi Katsika and Leigh Fernandez
[Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 9:4/5] 2019
► pp. 600–627

Investigating vulnerabilities in grammatical processing of bilinguals

Insights from Basque-Spanish adults and children

| Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language | Université de Montréal | IKER UMR-5478
| Université de Montréal | IKER UMR-5478 | Université Bordeaux-Montaigne
| Department of Psychology, Faculty of Social Science, University of Oslo
Bilinguals show a large gap in their expressive-receptive abilities, in both languages. To date, most studies have examined lexical processing. The current study aimed to assess comprehension and production of verb agreement, i.e., grammatical processing, in bilinguals, and to examine the factors that might modulate them: exposure, age and language-specific morphological complexity. Twenty balanced Basque-Spanish bilinguals (10 adults and 10 children) were assessed on comprehension and production of subject-verb agreement in both languages and object-verb agreement in Basque. Twenty age-matched Spanish-dominant Basque-Spanish bilinguals were assessed in Spanish only. The results revealed a consistent gap in Basque in both children and adults, with an advantage for comprehension. In Spanish, a gap appeared in children only, with an advantage for production. The gap size did not vary with the amount of language exposure but with age and morphological complexity, suggesting that these factors modulate bilinguals’ grammatical processing.
Keywords: Basque-Spanish bilingualism, expressive-receptive grammatical gap, verb inflection
Published online: 09 October 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.17035.pou
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Azpiroz, Maialen Iraola, Shanley E. M. Allen, Kalliopi Katsika & Leigh Fernandez
2019. Psycholinguistic approaches to production and comprehension in bilingual adults and children. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 9:4-5 ► pp. 505 ff. Crossref logo

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